WORLD OF HAROLD PINTER
Q. 2. Write a note on the World of Harold Pinter.
Answer
Each of Harold Pinter's [first] four plays ends in the virtual annihilation of an individual. In Pinter's first play, The Room, after a blind Negro is kicked into inertness, the heroine, Rose, is suddenly stirken with blindness. In The Dump Waiter, the curtain falls as Gus and his prospective murderer stare at each other. Stanley Webber, the hero of The Birthday Party, is taken from his refuge for 'special treatment'. In The Caretaker, the final curtain falls on an old man's fragmentary (and unheeded) pleas to remain in his refuge.
Influences of Kafka and Beckett
As Pinter focusses more sharply on the wriggle for existence, each of his successive hero-victims seems more vulnerable than the last. Villain assaults victim in a telling and murderous idiom. Although Pinter's first wo plays are in one act, and the second two in three acts, each successive drama seems to begin closer to its own end, highlighting the final throes of the hero-victims.
But who are they—these nondescript villains and victims, acting out their dramas in dilapidated rooms ? Victims emerge from a vague past to go their ineluctable destruction. Villains are messengers from mysterious organisations—as in the works of Kafka or Beckett.
If Pinter has repeatedly been named as Beckett's heir on the English stage, it is because the characters of both lead lives of complex and unquiet desperation—a desperation expressed with extreme economy of theatrical resources. The clutter of our world is mocked by the stinginess of the stage-worlds of Beckett and Pinter. Sets, props, characters and language are stripped by both playwrights to what one is temped to call their essence.
However, Pinter is not only Beckett's spiritual son. He is at least a cousin of the Angry Young Englishmen of his generation, for Pinter's anger, like theirs, is directed vitriolic ally against the System. But his System cannot be reduced to a welfare state, red-brick
Answer
Each of Harold Pinter's [first] four plays ends in the virtual annihilation of an individual. In Pinter's first play, The Room, after a blind Negro is kicked into inertness, the heroine, Rose, is suddenly stirken with blindness. In The Dump Waiter, the curtain falls as Gus and his prospective murderer stare at each other. Stanley Webber, the hero of The Birthday Party, is taken from his refuge for 'special treatment'. In The Caretaker, the final curtain falls on an old man's fragmentary (and unheeded) pleas to remain in his refuge.
Influences of Kafka and Beckett
As Pinter focusses more sharply on the wriggle for existence, each of his successive hero-victims seems more vulnerable than the last. Villain assaults victim in a telling and murderous idiom. Although Pinter's first wo plays are in one act, and the second two in three acts, each successive drama seems to begin closer to its own end, highlighting the final throes of the hero-victims.
But who are they—these nondescript villains and victims, acting out their dramas in dilapidated rooms ? Victims emerge from a vague past to go their ineluctable destruction. Villains are messengers from mysterious organisations—as in the works of Kafka or Beckett.
If Pinter has repeatedly been named as Beckett's heir on the English stage, it is because the characters of both lead lives of complex and unquiet desperation—a desperation expressed with extreme economy of theatrical resources. The clutter of our world is mocked by the stinginess of the stage-worlds of Beckett and Pinter. Sets, props, characters and language are stripped by both playwrights to what one is temped to call their essence.
However, Pinter is not only Beckett's spiritual son. He is at least a cousin of the Angry Young Englishmen of his generation, for Pinter's anger, like theirs, is directed vitriolic ally against the System. But his System cannot be reduced to a welfare state, red-brick